


it probably melts down to nothing

by willowoftheriver



Series: this town will eventually take me [1]
Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Batman - All Media Types, Gotham (TV)
Genre: Alpha Jim Gordon, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe, Canon Blending, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Hypocrisy, M/M, Mild Gore, Movie: The Dark Knight (2008), Omega Oswald Cobblepot, child endangerment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:35:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21611569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowoftheriver/pseuds/willowoftheriver
Summary: Off in an alternate universe, Harvey Dent abducts Jim Gordon's family.(In other words, the Gobblepot version of the end of The Dark Knight, with some omegaverse thrown in.)
Relationships: Joker (DCU)/Bruce Wayne, Oswald Cobblepot/Jim Gordon, Rachel Dawes/Harvey Dent
Series: this town will eventually take me [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1612429
Comments: 6
Kudos: 73





	it probably melts down to nothing

The gun has gone cold in Harvey’s hand. It still seems too heavy for its size, just the same as the one he’d threatened Schiff with had.

(He should’ve shot him.)

Cobblepot snuffles against his pillow but doesn’t really stir. He looks comfortable there, curled up beneath layers of cashmere and silk. He’s not beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, but his face has smoothed out in sleep, age lines and even the whitened mass of scars around his ruined eye fading away into peaceful rest.

The room has the faint lingering scent of recent sex. Gordon’s omega had thoroughly welcomed him back to life before he ran off again on the Joker's whim, and now Cobblepot is unconcerned and unbothered and _breathing_ , cradled in his warm illusion of safety. His lips are parted just a touch to draw air into his filthy lungs, and something at their edges seems to have the _gull_ to twitch into a smile as both his eyes begin to move beneath their lids, even the damaged one.

No nightmares for him; no dreams about the blood that bought all of that cashmere and silk, and the bed, and the room, and the house, and _Gordon_.

No, Cobblepot is no beauty, and he never was, even in the photos Harvey’s seen of him when he was young, a collection of them stuffed into that bulging file of his on archive down at Organized Crime. He was thinner then, but there had always been something strung out and _weasely_ about his face, even with that birdlike nose in the center of it.

Harvey could understand just slipping into his pocket. _They got me early_ , Ramirez had sniveled, but that was just the way of it, wasn’t it? In this city, they got _everyone_ early, and Cobblepot had chosen well, got a man in just the right place and going up, up, up all the while. And it would be that simple, if it had just been money—in the last twenty four hours, money has been deemed more valuable than Harvey’s face and Rachel’s _life_ and all morality and _decency_ he ever once deluded himself into believing anyone valued—

But while every cop in Gotham is a whore, Gordon had taken it to a more literal interpretation.

Internal Affairs had looked at Gordon, hard. But there are no laws about simple association, not when there are no paper trails or evidence of questionable financial dealings that can prove out and out collusion. So Gordon kept his job even as so much of the other rot was slowly excised around him and that— _that_ is what Harvey thinks is the biggest fucking _joke_ of all of it, so demented that he can picture the clown’s destroyed slit of a mouth opening in a nasally laugh that’s all yellow teeth and rolling tongue.

The last good cop in Gotham, the only one who can’t be bought or threatened, a goddamn modern day Incorruptible, but that’s only because he has Cobblepot there to eat all his sins. A _legitimate businessman_ is what Penguin calls himself these days, and maybe that was enough for the Joker to initially pass him over, but the charade will dissolve at its seams now that Maroni and the rest of the competition are wiped out.

That maniac had done for Cobblepot in a week what Jim and the GCPD hadn’t been able to in twenty years. Joker would find that funny, too—think himself entitled to do whatever he pleases with Cobblepot’s empire, when he finally comes for him. (And if Cobblepot survives the night, Joker _will_ get around to him.)

Cobblepot begins to stir at the sound of his children’s whimpering. But he must be slipping, lazy and complacent after all these years of sustained success, because he only snaps awake when Harvey cocks the gun.

“If you scream for your boys,” he whispers, “I’ll have to put a bullet in Jimmy’s head here.”

Cobblepot’s good eye darts frantically from his children’s tearstained faces up to Harvey’s, where it lingers. (And he knows exactly what he sees there and for an instant it’s so painful there’s nothing except the smell of gasoline and charred meat, ashes and dead skin all in a tasteless layer around his gums.)

“Dent?”

“Stand up,” he tells him, the muzzle of the gun parting the fine blond strands of Jimmy’s hair.

He moves to comply, babbling in startled, sleepy semi-coherency as he does. “What are you doing? How did you get in here? Aren’t you—shouldn’t you still be—? I know what with Gotham General, but— What do you want? We can work something out, whatever it is. I—”

“You’re _so_ compelling, Cobblepot.” It’s satisfying to watch his breath hitch, his hope deflate, that little increase of tension in his shoulders, just from the tone of Harvey's voice. “It’s no wonder Gordon’s so devoted. But I’m not interested in your money. Move.”

Cobblepot’s nervous gaze seem to can’t help but skitter off to the corner of the room, even if he pulls it away after just an instant. Harvey’s just as blind on that side as he is, so he hadn’t noticed the lavish bassinet, the infant sleeping soundly there with its thumb in its mouth.

The ruined fingers of his free hand twitch around his coin, threading it in and out between his knuckles to settle heavy against his palm. He itches to flip it.

(Harvey will never have this—not a child or an omega or the blissful peace of mind that comes with the assurance that they’re safe in their beds, waiting for him to come home.

Gordon has that now. Not for much longer.)

“Jim was right,” Cobblepot spits, after Harvey’s attention has been on the baby for a touch too long. “Said you were a real son of a bitch when you were in I.A. Harvey Two-Face will smile at you one minute and rat you out of a job the next.”

Harvey just laughs in his face, the coin searing down where the sticky underlayer of his flesh meets the metal. It hurts so much that after a few seconds, he can’t even feel it, or anything, except that. _itch_.

Harvey hadn’t been able to see just from pictures why they call him _Penguin_ , but now he realizes he does look something like a bird—a scared, fat little bird flapping ineffectual, greasy wings in an attempt to look bigger. He knows he’s killed an obscene number of people throughout his career, some personally, some ordered, some who just disappeared off the edge of the docks or into a dumpster, never to be seen again. But even though they're both omegas, he doesn’t have the dominating presence of the clown, Cobblepot's life seeming so very _impermanent_ in a way Joker’s hadn’t even as the coin had been in the air and the gun to his head.

“We’re going for a drive,” he says, motioning him to go out the door first with a sharp, agonizing jerk of his chin.

The girl—Gertie, isn’t it?—gathers up Cobblepot’s purple pajamas in her fists, clinging to his side. Jimmy tries to do the same but Harvey keeps a hand tight around his shoulder, digs the gun a little harder into his scalp.

The ostentatious fucking _fortress_ that Gordon comes home to most days is under heavy lockdown—‘Joker Alert’, he would assume, like the rest of the city. But that means that Penguin’s boys are prepared for nothing less than an all out frontal assault, and right now the majority of them happen to be congregated around the front gates with the cops Gordon left stationed there.

Cobblepot thinks of screaming when they get outside; he as good as sees the thought cross his mind in real time. It would echo out here, and he doesn’t doubt there’s a sniper up on the roof somewhere, just facing the wrong way. Zsasz is in Arkham right now, if Harvey remembers right, but he's only one of many.

“Both of your children will be dead before anyone gets here,” he says, just as Cobblepot’s lips twitch open.

For half a second, he’s in that same moment of chaos as when the coin’s in the air.

(That moment is his earliest memory. Always paralyzing, but with hope in his throat. A little pocket of existence where there was a chance Dad wouldn’t hit him this time, if it just landed on tails. Except it was never tails.)

There’s a fifty-fifty chance whether Cobblepot decides that the loss of his children's, his _alpha's_ children's, lives is acceptable if it means saving himself. Given what Harvey knows of his history and reputation, it wouldn’t surprise him if he did.

But his mouth flattens out into a little line and he limps on, pretending he’d never considered trying anything in the first place. He only speaks once they slip off the property altogether into the back alleys and reach the car.

“You do know I haven’t driven myself anywhere in at least fifteen years?”

“It’ll come back to you.” Though he clicks his seatbelt in place once he settles in the back, just in case.

The leather of the steering wheel creaks beneath Cobblepot’s white knuckled grip. He barks the address at him and they falter off into traffic, swaying over into his blind side until he notices and jerks it unsteadily back. It happens more than once, and isn’t helped by his compulsive glances at Harvey in the rearview mirror.

“What do you want from Jim?” he finally asks.

Harvey grinds his thumb into the coin until it’s practically a part of his palm, until his scorched nail _breaks_. “Only what he owes me. Only what’s _fair_.”

“ _Anything_ you think you’re owed, Dent, it can be arranged. What, you want that—that crazy bitch? You want to put a bullet in his head yourself? More? I can _do_ _that_ , please—”

He never would’ve thought anyone who’s sat on the throne of Gotham’s underworld for so long would ever _plead_ like this—squeal like a bird with its feathers all plucked, to keep with the proper imagery.

“Sooner or later the Joker would’ve died anonymous in an alley in the Narrows like all the freaks used to if not for people like Gordon and the scum in his unit. He knew— _he knew_ they were dirty. Didn’t care. But why should he? He’s worse.”

Cobblepot actually _giggles_ , high pitched and off tune. “If only he was. Do you have any—any idea how much easier _my_ life would’ve been if James would’ve just agreed to get with the program? I mean, not Falcone’s, that would’ve been terrible, but mine, _mine_ —you’d think he’d make an exception for _me_! But no, not _once_ in twenty years—”

“When you lie down in the filth, it _always_ comes off on you.”

“Yeah, that’s true, Dent; how funny you should mention it. You know, before your good friend Batman came along, there was at least some _order_ in this city. The cops and the mob had a nice little equilibrium and the people like me could keep things regulated enough that—”

“Is that what you want to call it? All the city’s thieves and murderers left alone so long as they give you a cut of their profits, and that’s order, that’s the way it should be?”

“This city isn’t a place for white knights. It’s only my way of doing things that used to keep any hopped-up little goons from forgetting their place. Nobody ever went around blowing up hospitals in broad daylight and doing _whatever the fuck_ he did to you before the Batman sent everything straight to hell—”

“Don’t worry, Cobblepot. ‘Justice renders to everyone his due.’ And Batman will get his share of it soon, same as Gordon. You might even see it.”

“And you’re going to deliver it all personally? For God’s sake, you were the first incorruptible D.A. this city’s ever had and now, what, you don’t care about due process anymore? Did that fucking clown burn everything you learned in law school out of your head along with your face or—?”

He twists his free hand into Cobblepot's hair, jerks his head back hard against the seat. The car’s tires squeal as his foot flails out onto the brake, Gordon’s kids clinging to each other as they’re jolted forward into the back of the passenger seat.

“The law,” he hisses at him, heedless of the horns blaring from every side, “is a joke. Just a bad, unfunny joke. And for years, I was the punchline. But not anymore.”

Now it’s all just raw, uncaring _chance_. That’s the only state justice can truly exist in—some kind of cannibalizing void wherein it doesn’t even bother with itself.

Joker doesn’t embody it, whatever his wheedling excuses. He exists in the eye of it, scheming, _scheming_ —more than Gordon, than anyone. Always pulling the chaos around himself to hide it.

(At the very last instant, after the coin had already landed and spared him, Harvey had noticed Joker's finger on the hammer of the revolver, sitting there brazenly on his blind side. He never planned to die, never truly subjected himself to the whim of anything that was unbiased, uncontrolled, _fair_.

But his eyes glint a sickly joyful green whenever the Batman is even hinted at, the cloying scent of slick and needy omega falling from him in waves. And the coin might very well make him suffer for that before this is over.)

“Call Gordon,” he says, fumbling for the cell phone in his pocket and throwing it into Cobblepot's lap. “Tell him where to meet us. And _drive_.”

He taps Gordon’s number in without looking, raises it stiffly to the side of his head. The car grinds unevenly back into motion. Gordon’s kids whimper.

“It’s me, it’s Oswald,” he rasps as soon as the call connects. The agitated burst of Gordon’s voice replies, his exact words indistinguishable. “No, no, no, you have to make the time, listen to me—he’s _here_. You don’t have to _find_ him. He’s holding a gun to our _children_ , Jim, you’ve got to—”

Harvey is already tired of listening to him. He snatches the phone back, brings it to the only ear still on his head. “Gordon.”

“ _Dent_?”

Part of him, at least. Less or more, he can’t definitively say. Maybe both at the same time.

“What are you doing? Where are you? How are you even moving, you need medical—”

“You’re about to know what my suffering is really like.” Harvey runs his tasteless tongue along the jagged expanse of his exposed mandible, smells the first stirrings of infection as the bacteria finds its home in the seeping tissue clinging to his skull.

(Would Rachel flinch away from him if she could see it?)

“Where is my family?” Gordon’s voice has that note of panic Harvey is so recently familiar with, poised to bloom into hysteria. Good.

“Where my family died.” He disconnects before Gordon can respond.

Cobblepot takes a deep, shaky breath. Their eyes meet in the rearview mirror.

“Was it your omega?” he asks.

“She would’ve been.”

“But she . . . wasn’t. So do you—do you think this is _fair_? To drag _children_ into—”

His hand is in the omega's hair again, the strands cutting into it like razor wire. Blood seeps hot down his palm and the muzzle of the gun is against Cobblepot's neck hard enough to bruise and even his good eye has whited out with so much rage that he can barely _think_.

“You don’t deserve the air you breathe but you’re still alive and she isn’t. There’s _nothing_ fair about that! Just shut your mouth and drive!”

Cobblepot's throat clicks as he swallows dryly. His eyes don’t dart up to the rearview again.

When the car’s tires finally start grinding over ash and broken glass, Harvey sees for the first time the last place Rachel ever was. Maybe if he reached out and touched the blackened ruins, there’d be something of her under his fingers, too.

(Why, why did that fucking _freak_ choose to save him instead of her?)

The children fly to Cobblepot’s side as soon as the car doors open, and he doesn’t pull one back this time. Little _penguin chicks_ , shuffling along with their crippled mother—they both look so much like Gordon it sets his teeth on edge, turns his own sloughed off flesh sour in his mouth.

He can only guess where, exactly, she died. There’s uniform devastation, no clear center to the blast, but she’s in the air, disintegrated into dust that he breathes.

He stops on the edge where the floor ends, its twisted skeleton spilling two storeys down to a wet mass of ash disturbed with the footprints of firefighters and EMTs. Maybe it was there—where she sat and waited for someone who never came, while he was powerless, pathetic. An alpha is meant to protect his omega and he'd failed, he'd _failed_.

He hears the sirens and the bark of dogs before Gordon’s footsteps ever draw near.

“You brought your cops?” he hisses, raising his gun.

Gordon is sweaty, wan. His eyes immediately seek out Cobblepot where he’s slumped against a support beam, the children pulled tight to his chest.

“They only know there’s a situation. They don’t know who, or what. They’re just creating a perimeter.”

Harvey waves the muzzle at Gordon’s holster, half concealed beneath his jacket. “You think I want to _escape?_ There’s no escape from this. Put it on the ground.”

Every alpha instinct, every one of the primal, territorial pheromones he's oozing, are doubtlessly telling him not to give up his only weapon, but Harvey doesn't think Gordon is stupid enough to test him right now. Sure enough, he does as he's told, however reluctantly.

“This is where they brought her, Gordon. After your people handed her over. This is where she died.”

“I know. I was here, trying to save her.”

What a _joke_ that is. The clown would keel over. “But you didn’t, did you?”

“I couldn’t.”

“ _Yes_ , you could. If you’d _listened_ to me! If you’d stood up against corruption instead of doing your deal with the devil—”

“I was trying to fight the mob!”

Oh, he shouts that with such righteous fury, like he really believes it. But he’s been lying to himself for twenty years—by now, maybe he _does_.

“You _live_ with the mob, Gordon! It’s the mother of your children! And you go home to it every night but you dare try to justify yourself to me? You wouldn’t if you knew what I’d lost! Have you ever had to talk to the person you love most, wondering if you’re about to listen to them die?”

Batman hadn’t even given him that, though. He hadn’t been able to be there in her last instant. Instead, she’d gotten to listen to him being dragged away, knowing that it meant no one was coming for her.

She was alone.

“You ever had to lie to that person? Tell them it’s going to be alright, when you know it’s not?”

No, Gordon’s lies are never that easily undone. Never that well intentioned.

“Well,” he breathes. “You’re about to find out what that feels like.”

He sidesteps towards Cobblepot, kicking Gordon’s gun away with a flick of his foot.

“Harvey,” Gordon says, suddenly so _infuriatingly_ fucking calm in spite of the little tremor in his voice. “Put the gun down. You don’t want to hurt my family.”

“No, just the person you need the most.” The muzzle of the gun hits the side of Cobblepot’s head, digging into the tenderest part of his temple. “Is it him? He’s held your leash for so long, would you even know what to do without him?”

“Put the gun down.”

Maybe it’s a scenario Gordon has too often considered the possibility of for it to have immediate impact—Cobblepot ending up with a bullet in him, bleeding his miserable life away in some filthy downtown warehouse. So Harvey moves on.

Gertie whimpers as the gun passes over her head. Cobblepot draws both her and her brother even tighter against his chest, glaring up at him with an intensity that should almost look ridiculous on his little round face. But it doesn’t, and maybe if Harvey were still capable of fear, it would make him wary.

Instead, the muzzle continues over to Jimmy, and Gordon finally cracks.

“Goddamn it, _will you stop pointing that gun at my family_?!”

Harvey smiles with what muscles are still left, even as Cobblepot lunges forward, teeth bared, clawing at him with one hand and pulling his son away with the other. He slams the gun across the omega's head.

His scalp splits open, blood welling up through greasy black hair to slip down over his eye. Harvey felt as much as heard the crack of metal connecting with bone, and Cobblepot seems appropriately stunned, hanging onto Jimmy’s shirt with a weak grip he pulls him out of with no effort.

“ _Dent_!” Gordon’s like a rabid dog pacing in a cage, uselessly snapping its jaws, and the thought nearly makes Harvey laugh, because wasn’t that exactly what the Joker had been before the mob set him loose?

(Who knows what Harvey might be creating?)

“I’m sorry. For everything. But please, _please_ don’t hurt him.”

It’s not as though the apology is convincing but the _desperation_ —that’s real. It’s all Harvey has wanted, but it’s not _enough_.

Joker was merciless, and so were Wuertz, and Ramirez, and Gordon himself, so Harvey will be, too.

Jimmy’s crying morphs into full on sobs as Harvey’s grip tightens on his shoulder, the gun is cocked beside his head. But then the shadows shift, and there comes another voice.

“You don’t want to hurt the boy, Dent.”

It’s true that Harvey, of all people, knows about wanting to be better than your parents. This boy is, or at least has the potential to be, more than the sum of the filth that made him. But it’s not about _him_ , just like it wasn’t about Rachel.

“I want what’s fair! You—”

Part of the blackness coalesces into a silhouette that breaks away from the whole, though the first thing that becomes visible of the Batman is his mouth, pale and fragile where it sits exposed beneath the cowl. He’s just a man under there, nothing more.

“You thought we could be decent men in an indecent world. That we could lead by example, bend rules but not break them. But you were wrong. This is a _cruel_ world, and the only morality in a cruel world . . .” Harvey slips the coin between his index and middle fingers, raises it up over Jimmy’s head. “. . . is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. **_Fair_** _._ ”

There’s almost a flinch in that exposed part of the Batman’s face, a little flicker of . . . something. And his eyes—so blue, but darker than usual. “Nothing fair ever came out of the barrel of a gun, Harvey,” he says softly, some of that artificial rasp going out of his voice.

“His boy’s got the same chance she had. Fifty-fifty.”

“What happened to her wasn’t chance. We decided to act, we three. We knew the risks, and we are all responsible for the consequences.”

“Then why was it only _me_ who lost everything?”

“It wasn’t.”

He sounds almost pleading, almost _sincere_. But there are also smudges of makeup on his suit, white greasepaint in irregular patterns transferred from fingers and knuckles and even some _red_ here and there, sweeping across his shoulder towards his neck. Harvey can imagine the clown’s eyes lolling backwards in his head as he dragged his lips over him, breathed in the Batman's scent even as he beat him.

Batman might not understand, but he hasn’t lost anything. He’s only _gained_.

“The Joker chose me,” he says, even though he thinks it’s only half true. It’s always really been about the Batman for him. Harvey was just another pawn.

(He wasn’t even the main character in his own destruction, not entirely. He doesn’t know if that makes it harder to bear or not.)

“You were the best of us. He wanted to prove that even someone like you could fall.”

“And he was right.”

“But you’re fooling yourself if you think you’re letting chance decide. You’re the one pointing the gun, Harvey, so point it at the people who were actually responsible. Me. Gordon. And you.”

Harvey had planned to do that all along. It’s just a pity the clown isn’t here to see it. “Fine. You first.”

He flicks the coin into the air with a practiced ease, one of the few things that hasn’t been burnt out of him, and catches and turns it on his palm. Lady Liberty’s scarred face stares up at him.

He shoots Batman in the next instant and thinks, as he collapses to the ground, that at least Joker won’t have much to laugh about anymore.

Harvey then decides to be generous and do himself next, even though Gordon doesn’t deserve it. It lands on the unmarred side, and he can’t help but feel a sort of loss when it does.

“Your turn, Gordon.”

“They’ll never find your body,” Cobblepot shrieks. The high-pitched, grating note of hysteria in his voice undermines the threat. “You think you’ve lost everything now? You have no idea how much I can still take! If you kill my son, Dent, if you—there won’t be anything _left_ of you to find—!”

“You’re right, Harvey,” Gordon cuts in over him. “Rachel’s death was my fault, but punish _me_ —”

“I’m about to.” He smooths Jimmy’s hair back, a kind touch. More than the Joker ever gave. “Tell your son it’s going to be alright, Gordon. Lie. Like I lied.”

Gordon’s hands are clenched into useless, white knuckled fists at his sides. He locks his bloodshot eyes onto his son and tries to contort his face into something a little less horrified. “It’s going to be alright.”

Cobblepot screams as he flips the coin. But he doesn’t catch it.

Something slams into him and then he’s airless, weightless. The sky is rushing away from him and taking with it all that ash drifting through it. Rachel’s memory stays up there with it, and all the pain, all the hate it's pushed into the marrow of his bones—

He stops falling, and all at once, everything is gone.

**Author's Note:**

> So I started watching Gotham recently. Not very far into it, but Gobblepot is rocketing towards OTP status. Obviously, 98% of Gotham canon isn't compatible with the Nolan movies, so it's a very uneven blend of the two. How did Oswald's eye get all fucked up in this universe if Bane isn't due in Gotham for another eight years? I dunno, man. And which actor Gordon looks more like is up to you.
> 
> I imagine Jimmy Jr. goes on to become the same stone cold psychopath he is in the comics.
> 
> I always assumed Harvey was blind on his bad side because, I mean, it was on fire, so I threw it in. And the Joker does indeed have his finger on the hammer of the revolver during the hospital scene. So much for chaos.
> 
> I threw in omegaverse for them to have kids, but it was also just fun to write. :) What wasn't fun to write was the Harvey/Rachel, as I can't say I've ever liked her.
> 
> "Justice renders to everyone his due" is from the Code of Justinian, which I guess Harvey would be somewhat familiar with as a lawyer?
> 
> The majority of the dialogue in the end is directly from the film script, so if you recognize it, it's not mine. And the title comes from the (underrated) song "Death In Her Room", by Bertine Zetlitz.


End file.
